The dawn came later than Marco thought it would, or perhaps just felt that way. He had heard older children graduating into their class talking about how they suddenly needed less sleep, how the stats buoyed the body to a point where the normal reluctance to get out of bed and to work was much lighter.

Whether that was true or not, Marco was suddenly awake and completely alert. He couldn’t tell in that moment whether that was really because his constitution score was rewriting the script on what his body needed to survive, or if it was Elisa screaming for him to wake up as half of the sun peeking over the horizon illuminated the massive body of a truly giant fish coming towards them.

“About time!” Elisa yelled. She was leaning almost all the way out of the boat, holding her hand in the water. “It’s been coming for about a minute now. It’s getting faster. Can you make the boat move any quicker than it is?”

“No.” Marco jumped to the wheel and gave it a spin. “Not much. But I can make it work harder.”

The fish was trying to broadside them. It would have been the narrowest part of the fish body hitting the widest portion of the boards. In other words, it was the strongest weapon of the fish against the weakest part of the ship. As improved as the ship had been after absorbing a fish power, it wouldn't hold up to that kind of damage.

Marco angled the ship into the path of the fish, cutting slightly to the right of its trajectory.

“You sure about this?” Elisa asked.

“As sure as I can be. You think the fish will turn too?” Marco said.

“Maybe, but turning takes effort,” Elisa said as she plunged her hand in the water. Soon, there was a small gleam coming from that part of the waves.

“What are you doing? Trying to feed it?”

“I’m trying something. Those levels you got me last night did something to my skills. I have an idea, but we’d have to get pretty close to the fish to do that. Can you do it?”

Marco thought about his options and read the monster description for good measure. Knowing things tended to help in this kind of situation.

“I can probably do something. You won’t get yourself eaten?”

“I’ll sure try not to.” Elisa kept her hand flickering. “Don’t worry about me. Do your thing. We’ll need it.”

Marco let his gun reload shot after shot as he peppered the water in front of the approaching beast. He doubted it was doing much, but even a bit of damage and distraction would help with what he was about to try.

Back on the island, he had been the acknowledged athlete, the person with whom it was pointless to play games unless you had a class and stats that made it unfair in the other direction. It hadn’t always been that way though. He had been smaller than most of the almost-class-age children for most of his life. Back then, facing stronger, larger kids, he had to learn tricks to make it possible to win.

One of them was going to be useful here. He couldn’t outrun the fish, and going head-to-head would end in a floating patch of blood and splinters he needed to avoid at all costs. That left misdirection followed by sudden action as his best option, and he was committing to the choice fully. He didn’t want to just fool this fish. He wanted to juke it out of its shoes.

The fish tracked them as they angled away to the side, and Marco kept the wheel straight as long as he could. Sparing a moment to tell Elisa what he thought would happen in the next few seconds, he then cranked the wheel as hard as he could in the other direction. The wind was blowing that way, which meant not only did the rudder pull the ship hard to the side, the increased propulsion against the raised mast kicked them up another notch beyond even that.

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The fish noticed them cutting away to the other side and instinctively turned as fast as it could. Marco watched it pull as hard as it could after them, more than fast enough to match their new trajectory. He fired his gun as fast as he could, trying to keep it from noticing what he was trying until it was too late.

It worked. A second before impact, something froze in the Bladefish’s otherwise smooth movement, slowing it down so much it looked like it had ground to a stop. Marco spun the wheel around again, letting the side of the ship scrape the now nearly immobilized fish.

“That’s the thing about being big!” Marco hollered at the top of his lungs. “It’s easier to pull muscles! You should have stretched!”

The system had been right about this thing being too big for its own build, and as the fish paid the momentary price for overextending its body, Elisa got everything she could out of it. Hanging her hand over the side, she made contact with the fish with the same bright flash Marco had seen in the water before. The fish jerked, then stopped all efforts to recover as it flopped onto its side.

“It’s dead?”

“Just stunned!” Elisa yelled. “Can we run now?”

Marco considered it. The fish was hurt, and they might just have enough speed to get away from it now. The problem was that fish like this were generally a bit smarter than they looked. It would learn something from the experience, and he doubted the same trick would work twice.

“No!” he yelled. “Don’t worry, though! I’ll be right back!”

Unsheathing his rapier, he pumped a shot from his gun into the gills of his incapacitated enemy, rushed the side of the boat, and jumped overboard directly on top of it. Hooking his hand around the scaled dorsal fin, he stabbed his rapier deep into the monster’s flesh.

The pain seemed to shake the fish out of its stupor. It dove immediately, taking Marco with it.

Uh-oh. It’s trying to run. And I can’t breathe underwater.

Marco twisted and pulled on the sword as the fish took him deeper and deeper, ripping through flesh and hoping to hit something vital. They left a trail of blood behind them as the fish tried its hardest to get him to a level of water pressure he couldn’t survive, pumping its powerful tail and relying on its streamlined, built-for-water body to get there quick enough to survive.

Marco didn’t have that same streamlining, but he was fine with that. Letting go of the fin, he kicked backwards away from the fish, wrapping both of his hands around the hilt of the rapier and letting the water resistance catch his chest like wind in a sail. The fish couldn’t react in time. It sped forward as Marco jerked back, pulling the sword a good two feet back and opening up a wound in its side Marco could have climbed into.

The fish gave one last jerk to the side, trying to heave itself off the human sword that had pushed it to the edge of death. It worked as far as getting the sword out, but did nothing to close the giant wound. After that jerk, it went suddenly still. The fish was dead.

And so will I be too, if I don’t get to air.

The sheer depth of the water he was in was doing something to him, and he found himself running out of oxygen resources much quicker than he would have expected. He started paddling upwards towards the light of the newly dawned sun, holding onto his sword as the lack of air slowly began to shut off his lights.

He made it, somehow. Breaching the surface of the water, he took a huge breath and started yelling. If Elisa didn’t see him soon, he’d be easy pickings for anything that swam his way. Things turned out pretty well in that regard, and he was able to clamber aboard the ship only a few moments later.

“Never do that again!” Elisa bent down to beat on Marco as he caught his breath on the deck. “Why did you ever think that was a good idea?”

“I figured your little flashing lights gave me a chance.” Marco burped up a lungful of salt water and coughed his way through the next sentence. “Could you always do that?”

“Not much. Not really. I was trying last night but it only slowed the smaller Bladefish.” She smiled. “But the levels last night convinced the system I needed a little bit more on the combat side. I can’t fight like you’ll be able to, but I should be able to help. A little.”

Marco gave her an exhausted, water-logged look. A little as defined by Elisa was sometimes a whole lot. He had once seen her walk into her house to read a little, then had to worry about her for three whole days. She had once said she knew a little about goat anatomy, then absolutely shamed a poor visiting agricultural expert who had said something wrong about horn shapes and their purposes.

They had both gotten in trouble for that. Her for embarrassing the man, and him for laughing at it.

“What do you consider to be a small amount of fighting?”

“I got a modified version of a trait from another class. You remember that elementalist who came to our village last summer? The one who could light fires with his hands?”

“Yeah.”

Elisa held up her hand and coated it with fire, then let the fire disappear before doing the same with ice.

“I can do some of that. It’s called elemental manipulation. It’s not really for fighting, but I think I can use it that way. A bit.”

“I don’t know. It seems like you’d have to keep your hands on something for a long time for it to work.”

Elisa smiled, reached out her hand, and touched Marco on the chest before shocking him both physically and metaphorically. A bright flash jumped from her hand to his skin, and he found himself completely incapable of controlling his body for a moment. He was as stiff as a board outside of the initial reflexive movement away from the shocking palm. It was over just as quick as it started, lasting several blinks but not much more than that.

“You really forgot about how this worked on the fish? It won’t let me do much damage at my level, but I also have this.” Elisa waved a petite, thin-bladed stabbing dagger towards him. “I can defend myself, at least. Which is good because we are going to need a dungeon sooner rather than later. And if I’m right, there should be one that way. We’ll hit it in an hour.”